Inspiration?

 Ever wonder where my inspiration comes from and why I take the photos that I do? Well, recently many of them were inspired by the new dragon book my sister and I were working on. 

We'd been working on it for months, and had done a rough layout of the pages, and there were still several sets of new photos that I wanted to take to include. There was also one photo which we both really liked, and it needed to be in the book. It had been taken way back just after the baby dragons had hatched, but being a vertical photo it couldn't take up a full page, and it just wasn't working with anything else.

It really needed to be paired with some photos featuring books. That's when I got the idea to photograph a brand new 'library scene'.  It was back in November, and I'd just finished photographing Winston and Saphira moving in together. Their lair was still set up on the dining room table, so I quickly put together a 'library' scene with every small book I own, right in the middle of the dragon's lair..

I took lots of photos of the little dragons reading, and then my sister put together a spread using that original photo of Winston and his kids....

We decided it worked well there. But then, while I was in the middle of the 'Drako' story I had the idea to share both Winston's and Saphira's back stories, and we thought it would be fun to include their baby photos in the new book somehow as well. But how? Well, how about using that photo of Winston looking at his photo album with his kids? They could be looking at their parent's old baby photos. So that photo was removed from the 'library' page that I'd just taken the photos for...

and it was moved once again to create the 'looking at Baby Photos' page, where it finally stayed.  ​

And that's just one example of the thought process involved in putting together a new book, and coming up with brand new scenes to compliment existing photos, and why the whole process  seems to take forever. 

​These are some of the other recent photo shoots which were done specially for the book....
​Moving in together...

Agnes and the birds in the snow...

...and the entire Little Dragon's First Christmas story...

 ...and there's still one final story which I photographed back in early December for the end of the book, which hasn't even been shared yet.